Monday, December 2, 2013

Window on Eurasia: By Dashing Their Hopes, Yanukovich has United Ukrainians, Krylov Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, December 2 – By his
actions over the past two weeks, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich has done
something many in Ukraine thought impossible and many in Russia feared: he has
given Ukraine a national idea and united Ukrainians of all nationalities behind
it and against himself, according to a Russian nationalist theorist and
activist.

In a comment on
APN.ru today, Konstantin Krylov says that what is going on in Ukraine represents
“an interesting, instructive and long-expected historical moment:” the
Ukrainian leader has “just given his country a national idea,” one that will
transform it and its relation with the Russian Federation (apn.ru/publications/article30650.htm).

Up to now, Krylov says, “Ukrainian
dreams” – and he uses English here – “could not unite Ukrainians, Russian
speakers and simply Russians” for the simple reason that these three groups
wanted very different things and the realization of any one of them “was viewed
by the others as a threat to itself and its own identity.”

But now an idea has been “found”
that provides the basis for uniting all these groups into “a single civic
nation.” That idea is “European integration as a Super Dream which unites the
Ukrainian political system as a whole.”Those who do not share this dream will “be thrown ... into the dustbin
of history.”

Krylov says that those who say a
European vector has always been part of the Ukrainian agenda may or may not be
correct, but only now, as a result of the EuroMaidan has it become truly
unifying, the result, he argues of “the simple and extraordinarily elegant” use
of an underlying psychological strategy” of playing on expectations and dashed hopes.

To explain his argument, the Russian
commentator offers the following analogy: “Imagine that you have promised your
daughter a Barbie doll for her birthday. Perhaps she didn’t really want the
doll all that much but she had already become accustomed to the idea that she
would be getting it.”

“And then suddenly, on the eve of
her birthday, you say that you aren’t going to buy it for her because there is
no money in the family even for morning kasha.”As a result, your daughter wants that doll more than she could ever have
imagined before. In her eyes, “you are a terrible person, and the Barbie doll
is the distillation of all her desires.”

Exactly the same thing has happened
in Ukraine with regard to “’European integration,’” Krylov says.It is now too late to explain to Ukrainians
that the proposed agreement with the EU is not just “honey and sugar,” that “it
doesn’t mean real integration” with Europe, and that “Algeria, Morocco, India,
and almost all of Latin America have [such agrements].”

Any such discussions are “worth
nothing because just before the signing of the agreements, they were taken away
(as it were under the pressure of hated Russia) and those who protested against
this were beaten.”That has been “quite
enough” to transform a “pragmatic question” into a moral issue, “a national
dream and ‘a light in the window.’”

Everyone in Ukraine can and does share
in these feelings, Krylov suggests. To be sure, he admits, it is “more
complicated” for those in the eastern portions of the country to do so because
they know that joining Europe may have some negative consequences for the economy
where they live.

But “all the same,” they can too because
“this idea has gone beyond the limits of the ‘material’ and become a pure Idea,
an idea of moving toward Absolute Light (Europe) and a flight from the Prison House
of Peoples (Russia).” If for some reason the Ukrainians “don’t learn this lesson”
this time around, Krylov says, “it will be repeated, as many times as
necessary.”